Twitter goes visual

Face it—images are much easier to consume than text. On Twitter, visuals are even more important since they increase the size of your content in a person’s Twitter stream. Therefore, don’t leave Twitter out of your visual content plans.

55% of tweets sent contained a photo and accounted for 57% of all engagement.

31% of tweets sent contained a link yet were responsible for 26% of @replies, retweets and favorites from brands.

5 billion Vine loops per day according to Twitter.

Actionable Twitter Marketing Tips:

Include at least 1 image in your tweets. The eyes have it! Show them what you’ve got. One of my followers used the image from my article and got 9 retweets.

Twitter hashtags

Hashtags have become an accepted form of shorthand to identify and aggregate information on social media. On Twitter the use of hashtags increases interactions. This makes sense since your content reaches a broader audience of people seeking the information on that topic even if they’re not following you.

Twitter customer service

Many customers turn to Twitter more than other social media networks to get answers to their customer service questions. When they do, customers expect a response from a brand within an hour, according to Lithium research. That’s not the reality they experience, however.

Airlines like @JetBlue are good at being present and active on Twitter. Twitter provides an additional platform to get out time sensitive messages like flight delays and gate changes.

Social media monitoring firm Brandwatch ran a test to determine how well brands responded on Twitter. Using their community management team’s accounts, they tweeted 300+ times to about 100 brands. They used a neutral comment with an @ sign, a direct question which included an @ sign and a complant about a brand without an @ sign.

Top brand responses on Twitter according to Brandwatch were BestBuy and Nordstrom both of which answered in 1 minute!!

6% of brands engaged with any tagged @mention overall.

6% of retail brands tweeted with targeted @questions managed to respond within the study’s 5 day period.

Actionable Twitter Marketing Tips:

Make sure someone is home on Twitter. Don’t let the Twitter conversation go on without you. At a minimum respond to people who include your Twitter handle.

Train customer service employees to respond via Twitter. Stand out from the pack by being prepared to respond to prospects on Twitter. Also, be available on customers’ timetables, not just your work hours.

Understand that not everyone is a Twitter believer. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic found that Twitter was good at propagating traffic on Twitter.

The bottom line: Include Twitter in your social media strategy to ensure that your firm and brand remain visible and part of the social media conversation.

How do you use Twitter to improve your business?

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

This is not an affiliate offer.

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